Napalm Death’s damaged sound has touched on a breadth of sub-categories
— violent Thrash on the 1987 pre-Greenway release Scum, defiant Crust
Punk with the socio-political fire of 1988’s From Enslavement to
Obliteration, light-speed Death Metal with 1990’s Harmony Corruption —
but is best encapsulated as “Grindcore.” As a term that’s gained
underground currency since it was coined by original Napalm drummer
Mick Harris, Greenway approximates that Grindcore was intended to
classify “anything that was painfully slow to as fast as you liked it,
with all points in-between.”
Today, the typical Grindcore song heaves layers of inhumanly fast
guitars and berserk “blast beat” drumming upon any discernable harmony.
As a niche aesthetic, it works strongest in short doses, as aptly
exemplified by Napalm’s recent full-length (the band’s 14th), Time
Waits for No Slave (on Century Media Recordings).
Tracks with weighty
names like “On the Brink of Extinction,” “Procrastination on the Empty
Vessel,” and “Suppressed Hunger” work like vile jackhammers, pumping
away mercilessly, while Greenway’s beastly and garbled voice ruminates
on images of mankind’s filth and decay.
With borderline-indecipherable vocals and an endless pounding of
instruments that resembles some protozoic form of music, what about
this intense and polarizing style could ever be thought of as
attractive?
In Greenway’s case, “What’s not exciting to me is anything that’s really metronomic or straight to the beat. Things lose a bit of an edge when they’re like that. There’s nothing better than organic music that sounds like it’s going to fall apart. Grindcore always gave me that.”
(Buy tickets, check out performance times and find nearby bars and restaurants here.)
